


What is the truth of love

by bloodandcream



Category: Supernatural
Genre: I Think This Counts As Sappy But Im Honestly Not Even Sure What It Is, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-06-12
Updated: 2014-06-12
Packaged: 2018-02-04 09:05:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,332
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1773493
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bloodandcream/pseuds/bloodandcream
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>What is it to define a thing. To name a concept and to know it. To communicate with shared understanding. To grasp it’s truth.</p>
            </blockquote>





	What is the truth of love

What is it to define a thing. To name a concept and to know it. To communicate with shared understanding. To grasp it’s truth.

To define a thing you must know the truth of a thing. But most things change with time, and sadly most truths change with time as well. You cannot know something absolutely if it is constantly shifting. The most pure, absolute truths of the universe are things that never have and never will change. These things are few and far between, these truths, centuries, eons, humans have struggled to define them, never satisfied, never quite knowing them. For humans are physical creatures and these infinite truths are incorporeal.

Some angels might think that they know these things. Castiel often believed that only God knew the absolute truths of the universe. That did not stop him from wondering.

What is it to love.

Many will say that angels do not feel emotion. They are soldiers and they are tools, creatures weft of God’s will and bent to his word. Creatures of loyalty and absolute duty. Angels do not have free will and they do not have emotions. This is something Castiel used to believe. But he knows better now. Angels can experience emotions, but in a different sort of way than most might think.

Emotions are not always the unsteady wild things most might believe them to be, tempestuous storms full of lightning and hail. They can be constant and strong, run deep and surge powerfully even for as calm as they are. Angels are creatures of time and vastness. Fleeting emotions are not something they frequently experience, but there are feelings beneath the stoic surfaces, reservoirs in underground caverns, deep wells that run so far into their being they can change the surface, over time. Angels have emotions, they are capable of pride, of jealousy, of want. They are capable of many things, but often slow to realize.

Castiel has learned this lesson as he has struggled to define love.

Once it was a concept of admiration and devotion to his father. Blind faith. Unwavering duty. Love was a state of being in grace. But things were simple then and it was easy. Love is never easy.

Castiel asked himself if it was sacrifice. After he had placed the faith once held only for his father in a man instead, sacrificing his home and everything he had ever known, Castiel first wondered if what he felt was love. It was all consuming and fervid, it tipped his world upside down and set his compass spinning. He felt as though he had lost all sense of direction. But he knew this man, this righteous man whom he had saved and built anew, Castiel knew with certainty from somewhere unnameable that he was meant to follow this man. To place faith in him. To sacrifice for him. Castiel gave his arms and he gave his heart and he gave his life to follow this man. Was it love that could make him sacrifice like this.

Castiel asked himself if it was pain. Physical pain, the pain of wounds, of torture, of bleeding grace and being unmade. Metaphysical pain, a labyrinth of doubt and fear and longing. He was not aware how powerfully a thought could cause physical pain, how interconnected these things were. He had been caused pain for the sake of this man in more ways than he could remember, but it was the pain that was inflicted on him by this man, both intentional and non, that gave him pause. It was the pain that he desired to cut away from this man and bear himself, to lighten the load, to share in it, that made him think. Was it love, to desire to take another’s pain into yourself.

Castiel wondered if it was longing. He had not inhabited a physical vessel many times before this, and he never staid long. The afflictions and affectations of the corporeal had never mattered much one way or another to him. He had desired things before, his father’s approval, his siblings safety, but these things were felt as a thought, as a rational line taken for granted. The longing he felt for the righteous man was different and it was tangible, it was something he felt with his vessel. It was the swelling of waters in his deepest caverns to the surface rising for a tempest. The shifting and changing of his landscape. Was love a longing to touch and be touched. 

Castiel asked himself if it was heat. When the righteous man saw him, and it felt like the first time since he had been made by God that Castiel was seen by another, there was a foreign heat in his core. It felt like the fever ill of an infected wound, but that he could soothe it with his grace, this only seemed to be exacerbated by any attention. When the man lay him down and lay down beside him, the heat that sat dense in his core stretched through his body, filling him and pressing against him, it would not be eased, try as he might to regulate the autonomic responses of his vessel the heat was only stoked by calloused fingers and he would not stop it for anything. Skin flushed red by the fever under his skin, his name a litany on the man’s lips, he feared before it broke that the heat would burn away everything he was. When he lay sated with the other in his arms and the heat receded, he knew it had burned away parts of himself, but he already knew that, knew that pieces which had been sacrificed or broken were irrevocably changed already, so he worried not. But he wondered if this heat was the love burrowed in his chest that hadn’t made it to his tongue yet. 

Castiel wondered if it was comfort. After trading blows and words, all they had put each other through and all they had fought for, when they came together it was an irrevocable shift and something changed between them. He did not understand the meaning’s of these shifts, the way people categorized things, named them, convinced themselves they knew the truth of it. But something seemed to ease in his righteous man and in the darkness between confrontations and sacrifices there was comfort. When the heat subsided, there were gentle fingers and soft breaths, finding safety in each other’s arms, finding an understanding. It seemed the tumultuous state they lived in made the comfort that much sweeter when it was given. Was this quiet comfort in each other what they called love.

Castiel knew it was belief. When he gave his belief it was absolute. It did not come without a price however. He would hold the one he believed in accountable. But for earning his belief the righteous man won himself Castiel’s strength, his loyalty, his fierce protection. The angel did not believe in many things, not lightly, not without due reason. But he believed in the righteous man, in his capabilities, in his justice, in his strategy. He knew belief in a cause was a form of love. 

It is a culmination of all these things. It is unnameable truths and indefinable secrets. Love is a state of becoming, a constant action, restless and unpredictable. Yet it is bedrock, adamantium strength and the certainty of conviction. Love is an illogical truth, it is many things. It is a personal truth. Yet at the same time love is a universal truth, throughout eons there has always been something, some commonality in stories, of patterns and beliefs that speaks of the infinite truth of love. Castiel is not certain if he can ever know these things. If he can ever define it. But he feels these things. And perhaps that is the truth of love, the sense of rightness in knowing things in your heart that you cannot name with you tongue.


End file.
